03 April 2018

Du cent pour cent Saint-Pourçain

Wine is produced in the Bourbonnais. It comes from the town of Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule, which is about 20 miles south of Moulins and 25 miles north of Vichy. I bet not very many people outside of France have ever heard of it.


The first time Walt and I went there was in 2007, when we drove over to the nearby Bourbonnais town of Montmarault to get Callie the border collie and bring her home. We stopped in Saint-Pourçain to taste the wines and had lunch in a restaurant there before going to the breeder's, which was (is?) called La Vallée des Géants.


Anyway, Saint-Pourçain wines have a long history. Grapes were grown there and turned into wine in pre-Roman days, according to what I've read. The Michelin guide calls Saint-Pourçain (pop. 6,000) « une jolie bourgade » and mentions the town's « maisons médiévales » and its « vestiges de fortifications ». Saint-Pourçain wines were prized by the Capetian kings of France for centuries in the Middle Ages.


And what about the wines? The reds are what French œnologists call « assemblages » — don't ever say they are blends or mélanges! — of the juice of Gamay and Pinot Noir grapes. The latter are the varietal used to make the finest vins de Bourgogne, and the former are the grape that is made into the fruity and drinkable wines of Beaujolais and of much of Touraine. The percentage of each grape can vary from wine to wine and producer to producer in Saint-Pourçain wines, to vary their character and taste.



Saint-Pourçain white wines are made by "assembling" the juice of three different grapes — well-known Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, along with a local varietal called Tressallier. I find the whites especially good, because Chardonnay rounds them out and Sauvignon Blanc (or maybe Tressallier) gives them the right amount of acidity. I'd love to taste a wine made exclusively with Tressallier one day. The same grape, related closely to Chardonnay, is called Sacy in Burgundy.

10 comments:

  1. I had to google "bourgade"...I'd never heard the word before. Isn't nice when you discover something like this wine? I'm sure I've never seen a Pourcain label here in CA.

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  2. Bravo pour votre connaissance des cépages (et pas que livresque...) !

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  3. Un seul mot : Respect monsieur l'oenologue !

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  4. Though I'm not even a wine drinker much, myself, I have learned so much over the years, from you, about wine labels -- about what everything means, and what kind of grapes go into what wines we're familiar with-- it's all so clear, now :) Thanks for that :)
    Judy

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  5. I was on the impression, wrongly it seems, there was also a cheese called Saint-Pourçain. A Google search didn't produce any result for neither Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule nor Saint-Pourçain-sur-Besbre, both in the Allier.

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    1. I saw mention of a Saint-Pourçain cheese on Wikipedia and maybe other sites, but nothing more than a mention. No "-sur-Sioule" or "-sur-Besbre" — mystère et boule de gomme. I saw no such cheese in the shops around Moulins either. I'll keep looking.

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    2. Tu as raison. Voici ce que je viens de trouver sur Wikipedia:

      Produits du terroir de Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule

      Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule a donné son nom au :
      • Saint-pourçain, vin de Loire AOC
      • Saint-pourçain, fromage AOP

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  6. My first exposure to St. Pourcain wines was about 20 years ago, when we spent a night at a chambre d'hote in Chantelle. We visited a producer that was highly touted, and though their wines were excellent. At the time, the St. Pourcain appellation was just a VDQS (a designation which doesn't exist anymore), and I asked the winemaker if St. Pourcain is likely to get its AOC (now AOP) soon. She said hopefully in a couple of years; first the other producers had to bring themselves up to her winery's level (not bragging, just stating the truth). Well, it took a little longer (about 10 years), but now St. Pourcain is an AOP and there are many good producers. And the one we visited all those years ago has been available here in Maine for about 10 years now.

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    1. Thanks, Bob. It seems Saint-Pourçain wines got the AOC or AOP in 2009. The reds we bought were made with Gamay and Pinot Noir, but I think the Pinot Noir might be optional, just as Sauvignon Blanc is optional in the whites. The Leclerc hypermarket in Moulins had a good selection of Saint-Pourçain, as did the co-op in Saint-Pourçain itself of course. I even found some Saint-Pourçain wines in our Intermarché wine section in Noyers-sur-Cher the other day.

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  7. Thank you, as ever, for so much good information on these wines.
    The labels are quite interesting, and the second one is especially dramatic. I've never seen any Allier wines in North Carolina, where they tend to promote the local brews instead.

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